Quotes By Thomas Carlyle

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

No violent extreme endures.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.